A man has filed a lawsuit against the town of Sturgeon, Missouri, a little more than a week after a police officer shot and killed his small, blind, and deaf dog.

In a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Nicholas Hunter alleges that Officer Myron Woodson and the city of Sturgeon violated his Fourth Amendment rights when Woodson killed Teddy, his 13-pound blind and deaf Shih Tzu, shortly after finding the dog wandering in a neighbor's yard on May 19.

"Woodson's warrantless seizure of Teddy was unnecessary, callous, and egregious as it was unwarranted by law and violative of Plaintiff Hunter's most fundamental and guaranteed of constitutional rights," Hunter's lawsuit says. "At no time during the encounter between Teddy and Defendant Woodson did Teddy show any aggression towards Defendant Woodson. Teddy never barked, growled, or even moved towards Defendant Woodson. Instead, the small, blind and deaf dog simply kept trying to walk away, oblivious to the danger that Defendant Woodson posed to him."

The shooting has outraged the town's residents, especially after body camera footage obtained by a local news outlet contradicted the officer and city officials' narrative of events. The mayor of Sturgeon resigned last Saturday evening after defending the shooting for several days, and Woodson has been placed on leave.

The shooting, though, is only an egregious example of a phenomenon that is so common that it has its own tag on Reason's website: "puppycide." No one knows exactly how many dogs police shoot around the country, but every year there are more cases of wanton killings that, besides terrorizing owners, generate huge lawsuits, viral outrage, and in rare instances result in officers being fired, such as the case of an Arkansas officer who casually killed a nine-pound dog.

The incident in Sturgeon started when Teddy dug under Hunter's backyard fence while Hunter was out at dinner and escaped, leaving its collar behind in the process. A neighbor called a county dispatch center to report that the dog had wandered into their yard and to get help finding its owner. According to Hunter's lawsuit, the caller responded, "No, not at all," when asked if the dog was aggressive.

The town of Sturgeon's official Facebook page actually posted an alert on May 19 about the missing dog, along with photos of Teddy: "Do you know this doggie? Joint communications has been notified. The doggie seems in need of medical attention."

Medical attention was not what the doggie received. Woodson arrived on the scene, and a few minutes later he shot Teddy twice.

In the meantime, Hunter had been called and told about the Facebook post. He was on his way to pick up Teddy, but arrived too late.

A day later, the city of Sturgeon posted on Facebook about the incident, defending Woodson's decision: "Based on the behavior exhibited by the dog, believing the dog to be severely injured or infected with rabies, and as the officer feared being bitten and being infected with rabies, the SPD officer felt that his only option was to put the animal down," Sturgeon wrote. "It was later learned that the animal's behavior was because the animal was blind. Unfortunately, the animal's lack of a collar or tags influenced the SPD Officer's decision to put the animal down due to his belief that the animal was injured, sick and abandoned."

Both Hunter and the neighbor filed complaints with the city. "I cannot stress enough that this animal was in no way a threat to others," the neighbor, whose complaint was obtained by local news outlet ABC 17, wrote. "Woodson discharged his firearm multiple times in a residential area without a threat presenting itself, without warning."

ABC 17 also obtained Woodson's body camera footage, which showed that Teddy was never aggressive and didn't bark or growl. Woodson tried to lasso Teddy with a catch pole—a common tool used in animal control—but the dog simply shook its head free of the rope and trotted away. After fumbling the catch pole several times, Woodson drew his gun and killed Teddy. ABC 17 reported that Woodson's entire encounter with Teddy, from exiting his car to putting two bullets in the animal, lasted three minutes and six seconds.

After body camera footage was released, Sturgeon doubled down.

"The City believes that the officer acted within his authority based on the information available to him at the time to protect against possible injury to citizens from what appeared to be an injured, sick, and abandoned dog," Sturgeon posted in a follow-up Facebook post.

Of course, it would have been embarrassing to admit the real reason that the officer resorted to using his gun: He was unable to snare a blind, deaf dog and was too poorly trained to come up with a solution besides shooting a harmless animal.

But police habitually lie about the behavior of dogs that they shoot. Dogs are almost always described in incident reports as snarling, aggressive, or lunging, and because department policies typically allow police to shoot dogs when they feel afraid for their safety, these shootings are almost always deemed justified.

For example, last year in Missouri a police officer shot a family's dog and dumped it in a ditch. Similar to Hunter's case, the dog had gotten loose during a storm, and a neighbor called to report it missing. In another case last year, Detroit cops killed a woman's dog and dumped its body in a trash can. An Arkansas woman also filed a lawsuit after a cop accidentally shot her while trying to kill her Pomeranian—a toy breed that resembles a Koosh ball with legs.

This is the sort of behavior that's flagged as sociopathic when committed by anyone who's not represented by a police union.

And it's the sort of behavior that can cost a small town like Sturgeon quite a lot of money, as city officials are surely fretting now. After Sturgeon's mayor resigned last Friday, the acting mayor posted on Sturgeon's Facebook account: "Like you we were just as appalled by what we saw. The actions of the Officer involved are not the values and beliefs of the residents of Sturgeon or the board of Alderman. Currently I have made calls to the Boone County Sheriff to meet and discuss an investigation."

The city of Sturgeon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post A Missouri Police Officer Shot a Blind and Deaf Dog. Now He's Being Sued. appeared first on Reason.com.

ST. LOUIS—Rich LaPlume, 58, cracks his knuckles and leans back against a chipped door frame in the basement of St. Lazare House—a St. Louis community home for homeless youth with a history of mental illness. Taped to the wall behind him is a series of brightly colored motivational posters, with slogans like "I AM A FIGHTER" and "BELIEVE IN YOURSELF."

"When you're homeless and are dealing with a mental health condition, you lack so much more than a home," he tells me. "It's so hard to get on your feet, and you need so much support. And for so long, this population has been invisible. That's a problem." Around 30 percent of homeless individuals nationwide suffer from a mental health condition—a statistic St. Lazare aims to combat.

Yet LaPlume has problems of his own to worry about. As director of St. Lazare House, he has spent six years overseeing the full financial process of running the home, including the renewal of contracts and leases, the coordination with mental health care providers, and the allocation of grant money. Thanks to LaPlume and his team's programming, over 60 youth have been given a new life free from chronic homelessness.

But despite all of his hard work, as of this November, St. Lazare House is $155,000 in debt.

The problem, LaPlume tells me, isn't St. Lazare's, which by all measures is an exceptional success—offering stable housing to homeless St. Louisans, plus free mental health care and life coaching, all while maintaining nearly a 100 percent retention rate of its residents. Rather, the problem lies with the St. Louis office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which failed to process St. Lazare's grant renewal in time for its upcoming fiscal year, which started May 1, 2023. Since then, St. Lazare has been forced to pile up thousands in debt while awaiting reimbursement from the city, which the HUD office could not guarantee it would provide.

But the city failed to renew St. Lazare's annual contract in time. The deadline for renewal from the city was November 1, but due to even more bureaucratic backlogging, St. Lazare's contract wasn't ready. Until they received their contract back from the city, St. Lazare couldn't apply for reimbursement for the lost grant money, and were left to fall deeper into debt while they waited. Just recently, they were informed the reimbursement money wasn't coming.

Left without essential funding, St. Lazare has been forced to rely on savings to pay their lease. LaPlume laments, "It is because of the city of St. Louis that we are able to exist. And yet, St. Louis is our own worst partner."

This isn't just St. Lazare's story. St. Lazare House is one of many nonprofits nationwide suffering from dilatory allocation of federal grant money for the homeless. Most of the funding for homelessness organizations comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's "Continuum of Care" grant program, which allocates funding to states for coordinated housing programs for homeless adults and children. Each year, the federal HUD sends around $3 billion to states in grant funding for distribution to their homelessness organizations.

Yet every year, millions of dollars are sent back.

In 2022, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published an audit of Continuum of Care grantee spending levels—examining why, despite skyrocketing national homelessness, large portions of HUD grant money were left unspent. The findings were catastrophic. Between 2017 and 2020, OIG found that $454 million in Continuum of Care funding had gone unspent, or 9 percent of the program's total funding. Of those millions, $257 million had since been recaptured by the federal government during the period of the study. The rest was still missing.

How, amid a pervasive homelessness crisis affecting over half a million Americans, with the power to destroy the livelihood of major cities, can half a billion dollars in funding go unspent?

I ask LaPlume what happened to the missing HUD funds for St. Lazare, and how much the St. Louis city government had lost. His eyes light up: "You won't believe this." He pulls out his phone and dials the number for Shanna Nieweg, a woman he calls his "sister from another mister." Nieweg is the executive director of Horizon Housing Development Company, a homelessness nonprofit just down the street from St. Lazare.

Nieweg picks up immediately, and after a few sentences of prompting from LaPlume, she is rolling off numbers: From 2016 to 2019, the most recent period measured, St. Louis sent back $2.2 million in HUD Continuum of Care funding. This number jumps to roughly $2.7 million when including returned funds for planning grants—a sum greater than the four-year HUD budgets for both St. Lazare and Horizon Housing combined. For a city like St. Louis, with a homeless population of 1,100, the impact of this foregone money would be more than significant.

For community homelessness leaders like Nieweg and LaPlume, this bureaucratic ineptitude is personal. At 11:15 p.m. on October 2, St. Louis police entered a major homeless encampment near City Hall and ordered its residents to either clear out by midnight or be arrested. Images of the scene show armed police entering with flashlights and ordering confused and crying residents out of their tents. "They came in the middle of the night so they wouldn't be seen," LaPlume says. After a heated encounter with activists, the police abandoned the project around 1:30 a.m., telling the residents they could remain for the night. But the city's homelessness workers haven't forgotten.

LaPlume recalls quietly, "It was one of the most inhumane things I've ever seen in my life."

For the city's homelessness leaders, the financial waste and hasty dealings with encampments are a symptom of failed bureaucratic leadership. Even amid hard work and shrewd leadership, the disarray of city grant allocation and contracting can set local homelessness organizations up for failure. The problems in St. Louis, when compared to major West Coast cities like Los Angeles or Seattle, are relatively small: A journalist with the Los Angeles Times found nearly $150 million in federal homelessness funding for Los Angeles was returned from 2015 to 2020, as street camping exploded and the city's homeless population soared to over 40,000.

The investigators in the federal HUD audit probed into how and why federal grant money goes unspent in such massive proportions across the country. Their main finding was a number of issues in the tracking and monitoring of grantee spending. In the absence of clear and well-defined spending procedures for states and localities, they concluded, money is returned—or lost. They also noted the difficulty for grantees in finding affordable housing for their homeless—though affordable housing developers charge city governments with excessive bureaucratic red tape holding them back.

Unlike other agencies jostling for money in Washington, the Department of Housing and Urban Development struggles to spend enough. Halting its efforts at homelessness relief is a crisis of bureaucratic backlogging that withholds grant money from organizations in desperate need—not only setting such organizations up for failure but also forcing their home cities to seek out hasty and underfunded solutions to their housing crises. Funding for HUD is increasing next year by $116 million to cover funding increases for HUD homelessness assistance grants. But until HUD fixes its bureaucracy problem, it's unclear what effect the increase will have.

For now, organizations like St. Lazare that depend on HUD funds as a lifeline have no choice but to plow ahead. Many survive the bureaucratic chaos by working together, as do LaPlume and Nieweg. But even then, there are factors out of their control that threaten to shut them down. I ask LaPlume how he deals with all the uncertainty.

He responds, "We've been dealing with this for all our life. But everyone deserves a place to call a home and a stake in their community. So we're going to fight to keep them housed. No matter what."

The post The Feds Give States Millions To Fix Homelessness, but States Are Sending It Back appeared first on Reason.com.